Posts Tagged ‘Amazon EC2’

In the first post we looked at some common mistakes resulting in premature “Commoditization” declarations.

In this post we would look at IAAS and PAAS in more detail.

In software, it is rare to have Nobel-prize-worthy-discoveries. Still, it does not mean all inventions are trivial. At the high level, analyst point of view, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 share the same technology. In the real world, there are many differences. In the real world, Vista was a complete failure although it was “a commodity operating system” and windows 7 was well accepted.

And these days we have people speaking about IAAS ( infrastructure as a service) as a “dying dinosaur” because PAAS (platform as a service) is the new king. They must be kidding. Lets reconsider the facts.

Force.Com, the first PAAS, is not working out. I don’t know of any major company that built their entire successful new company on top it. The licensing, performance and “Governor rules” caused it to fail. What works nicely inside salesfroce.com did not work well for the rest of the world. Maybe that why they bought Heroku. Did any of their other acquisitions (DimDim\ManyMoon\Jigsaw\Etacts) run on Force.Com ?

VMFORCE.COM does not exist yet, as far as I can tell. It is just a press release , at this stage. When I read through the hype, there is no cloud portability at all, and it still looks like running JAVA on a single server with no scaling or multi-tenant capabilities. The home page seems quite stale.

AZURE is not much better off. At its current stage Azure is more similar to COM+ than it is to .NET . Microsoft has invested so much marketing money on Azure that people think it actually has something that can compete with EC2. In the real world, Microsoft has no solution to run Virtual Machines in the cloud for public access. Their PAAS solution can not run any of their applications – SharePoint,Exchange,Office, SQL Server Dynamics are all running on internal IAAS solution, not on Azure PAAS. Wait 3-7 years for this to happen.

Did anyone hear of “Facebook” or “Twitter” using any PAAS platform ? Funny, but they are not keen to run their services on their biggest competitors platform. I wonder why.

Even Amazon EC2, who is by far the market leader and innovator , has long, long road for to achieve the core feature set. Seriously. They added user management few weeks ago,only through the API, after four years in production. That’s probably the #1 feature any enterprise expects to find in any software service .

No one has really solved the problem of WAN based storage replication (despite bandwidth being “a commodity” 🙂 ). This is critical for IAAS success in the enterprise.

The most expensive and longest effort is rewriting existing software. There were trillions of dollars spent in coding existing applications. Why would anyone rewrite the same business logic in a new platform, if they don’t need the scale?

VMWARE succeeded because it has great economic benefits without requiring a rewrite. PAAS solution is probably the right way to go in the long run, but might stay marginal for quite long time, IMO. IAAS has a great start and would continue to evolve, but is far from being a commodity when looking beyond the hype.

A commodityis a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitativedifferentiation across a market. Commodities are substances that come out of the earth and maintain roughly a universal price. Wikipedia

I find it hilarious when some people describe clouds or the IaaS market as a “commodity”, or even worse – “legacy”.

It is a common mistake that I see again and again by people who don’t have a clue in what they are talking about or just ignore the little details.

The first point I want to make is that “Commodity” is often misinterpreted as “Easy to Produce” or “Low Margin,Bad Business”.

Take a look at oil production. While the end product does not have qualitative differentiation,its production requires some of the most sophisticated technology available. Drilling oil from the bottom of the sea necessitates huge investments, great science and an amazing technology.

Another example would be X86 chips. The X86 architecture is more-or-less the same as it was 30 years ago. It is available universally and there is no qualitative differentiation between different items. However, building a new FAB costs around $2B and Intel is one of the most successful companies on earth. No one would argue that there is no intellectual property in chip design.

The second important point is that vision is nice, but reality is nicer. My friend told me that in the late 90’s the technologists in Check Point thought that Intrusion Detection technology is an erroneous direction to follow. They thought that comparing signatures of attacks is reactive and it does not help the customer to passively monitor the attacks.

While they were right in their long-term vision, ISS sold hundreds of millions in IDS software ,in the meantime. Moreover, when the market shifted to IPS ( Intrusion Prevention systems) , ISS had good solid technology to start from, which took Check Point five more years to accomplish. As my father, the CFO, used to say, “The markets fix themselves in the long run, but in the long run we all die”. Technology adoption cycles are longer than they seem.

Some analysts are looking too far ahead. For example, two years ago everyone talked about hyper-visors as being commoditized. Microsoft and Citrix will give it it for free, KVN is for free anyway and VMWARE would have to follow. Surprisingly, in the last 12 months VMWARE sold more than $2B worth of , guess what, hypervisors.

Why are 200,000 customers being so silly and paying so much money when the analysts say differently?

For one reason, because Microsoft Hyper-V does not support NFS, yet, which is probably used by 40% of customers. Because Hyper-V can not handle memory over-commit, which means you’ll get about 30% less capacity from the same hardware. Because VMWARE Virtual Center is two generations ahead of Microsoft’s management server, and there is not much use for a hyper-visor that can’t be managed. See a nice post from 2008 about it.

So are the analysts the stupid ones?

Of course not. But they have not installed a hypervisor in the last five years. Furthermore , they are probably right in the long run. In three years from now (five years from 2008:) ) hypervisors might become a commodity. But it is much slower pace than it seems at first.

Remember how in 2000 Broadband Internet was just around the corner ? We’re in 2010 and only South Korea has upload and download speeds above 20Mbps . More on the commodity subject and especially in clouds in my next post.